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Sunday, 27 April 2014

VIETNAM: Too many graduates for too few jobs

VietNamNet Bridge – The number of graduates produced by Vietnam universities every year is 10 times demand.

That is the word of the unemployment report released last month by
the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, which
spotlighted the high unemployment rate of workers with higher education.

According
to the report, over 1.2 million workers were reported as “lacking jobs”
by the end of 2013, accounting for 2.63 percent of total laborers. Of
this amount, 900,000 laborers had been reported as “unemployed”, which
accounted for 1.9 percent of the labor force.

The proportion of
unemployed workers finishing junior colleges (3-year training) and
universities (4-5 year training) was relatively high, at 20.75 percent.
More than 72,000 holders of bachelors and masters degrees are
unemployed.

However, the figures have not surprised analysts at all.

Professor
Nguyen Minh Thuyet, former Deputy Chair of the National Assembly’s
Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children, commented that the
situation was foreseeable: the number of workers with higher education
simply far exceeds demand.

In a report he released in 2004, Thuyet
estimated Vietnam would only need 13,000-15,000 new bachelors every
year. At that time, Vietnam had about 100 industrial zones (IZs) and
export processing zones, which could utilize 500,000 workers at maximum.
Of the workforce, 5-7 percent had junior college or university degrees,
60 percent were skilled workers, with the remaining cohort unskilled.

Supposing
that Vietnam developed 10 new IZs every year, and 10 percent of workers
with high education retire, Thuyet posited. Vietnam would then need to
prepare 13,000-15,000 new workers [with college degrees] ever year.

At
the time of Thuyet’s report, ten years ago, junior colleges and
universities in Vietnam were already producing more than 200,000
bachelors every year, 10 times higher than demand. Today, the “capacity”
of the universities is now double that, at 400,000.

Under the
national human resource (HR) development program, Vietnam set a target
of 3.5 million of workers with higher education by 2015. However, the
country already had 3.7 million workers with higher education by the end
of 2013.

Deputy Minister of Labor, War Invalids and Social
Affairs Doan Mau Diep said on Tuoi Tre that a large percentage of
Vietnamese <intellectuals | degree holders> remain unemployed or
have to take low-paying jobs because of the “oversupply of unqualified
workers with higher education”.

However, ignoring warnings about
the surfeit of workers finishing junior colleges and universities,
schools continue to scale up, producing more and more baccalaureates
every year. Vietnam is striving to have 460 universities and junior
colleges by 2020.

Diep attributed the problem to an unrealistic education program.

Dr
Luong Hoai Nam, an analyst, has pointed out that 37 percent of
university graduates cannot find jobs because they lack the necessary
job skills. Moreover, 83 percent of them lack life skills, in the eyes
of employers,

Nam, who as a senior executive of big corporations
has interviewed thousands, noted that enterprises, or employers, usually
have to re-train their employees before assigning duties to them, and
prepare them with basic skills they should have learned at school.